72 of the catered repast. At last, the techni- cal director threw down his headset and shouted toward the set, "Guys, take a break!" The crew doused the hot lights and left Zack alone with Sunset, who did her best to "fluff" him back into readiness. The technical director sank back in his chair and groaned, "This is not going any- where. It's a fucking Slinky." A sleeping production assistant woke up and wandered down from upstairs. 'What's going on?" he asked. "We're waiting for wQod," a crew member said wearily. They all gazed hopelessly at the monitor, where all that remained on Sunset's person was a dan- gling pair of spiked slippers. 'Well, this dispels the myth that high heels give men an erection," another crew member observed An hour later, after a lengthy mastur- batory effort on Zack's part, the money shot was delivered. By the monitor, the weary production staff fell back in their chairs with a collective release of breath. Zack grabbed his clothes and raced up- stairs without speaking to anyone. " O F the major studs in the history of this business, there are only a handful of names," Bill Margold told me one afternoon as we sat in his darkened one-room office next to World Model- ing; he keeps the lights off to effect "the feeling of the womb" for the "porn kids" who might come here seeking counsel. Of the studs currently working, he said, T.T. Boy is "the only one that really qualifies in today's genre as the superwoodsman. T.T. is the perfect example of the video stud, because as video becomes more and more prolific, the quantity overtakes the quality, and T.T. is capable of just knock- ing them out, one after another after an- other after another. It's as if he's in the ring with a series of sparring partners and goes through thirty of them in a day and none of them has a face and that's what makes T. T. special. . . . It's high noon, gunslinging time, and T.T. is still walking and they're all lying dead in the street." A couple of weeks after the "CybereUa" shoot, the veteran porn filmmaker Ron Sullivan was shooting footage for" one of my down-and-nasties" for Caballero Home Video in his down-at-the-heels studio in the Valley. In the eighties, Sul- livan shot "graphic, no-prisoners" porn films in New York City for many compa- nies, including Caballero. When Cabal- lero fen on hard times and was sold, its new owner hired Sullivan to rebuild it, which he set out to do by targetIng the low end of the market. He joined the overpopulated world of shoestring West Coast operators who generate the "one- day wonders" (so called because they are often shot in one day) that serve an audi- ence craving an endless display of facial cum shots, gang bangs (a recent one, Fan- tastic Pictures' "The World's Biggest Gangbang," involved a hundred and fifty- one men), and pounding anal sex. If the Vivid Qyeen is the crown jewel of upscale "pretty porn," then T.T. Boy is the poster boy of this down-market vari- ety. "T.T. reflects exactly what that sort of porno is about," Caballero's senior video editor Bud Swope said, "where you screw the hell out of the woman and come all over her face. He throws girls around. He pile-drives till they protest. . . . He's just aggression." In an interview in the April, 1995, issue of Hustler Erotic Video Guide, T.T. Boy had this to say: "I was a shy little kid when I started, and now I'm just a guy who wants to fuck the shit out of all these girls. Just fuck 'em to death." He then proceeded to deliver the following mes- sage to al1 those women in the business "with big egos": "You don't want to work with me. I'll beat your boyfriends up and spit in your ['Ices That's what I think of you bitches, and then I'll kick you in the head." There is a certain dutifully scripted quality to this sabre rattling, as though T.T. Boy thought thIs was the persona his ['Ins expected of him. Or as though, if he didn't play the thug, he was at a loss who to be. T.T. Boy arrived the morning of the Caballero shoot without his script. Not that it mattered. As he pointed out to Ron Sullivan, in a Brooklyn mouth-full- of-marbles street voice (although he was raised in California), "Hey, I can remem- ber two fuckin' lines." He swung a few mock punches in the direction of the pro- duction assistant, but the move seemed more stagy than aggressive. Maybe it was the ['lct that, mid-swing, he was looking }{, THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 30, 1995 over his shoulder to see himself on the monitor. "Hey, don't hurt your hands," Sullivan shouted, playing along. "Remember when you showed up that time with a bandage on your face because you got in a fight? You mook!" He gave T.T. Boyan affec- tionate plug on the shoulder, then handed him a script and sat him in an armchair. T. T. Boy rehearsed, reading out loud, over and over, one of his two lines: "Per- fect. My own wIfe wants to watch me commit a perfect act of infidelity sodom- izing her best friend's asshole." But soon his eyes strayed back to the morutor, and he put down the script and watched him- self making various toothy grins and gri- maces at the camera. He seemed trans- fixed by the image. Two attractive women in lingerie were stretched out on a bed a few inches from his chair, but they might as well have been in another universe. Fi- nally, SullIvan came over and turned the monItor away. This was a stripped-down operation with one cameraman. A queen-sized bed was pushed up against a façade of bed- room walls with a fake window overlook- ing a painted landscape. A comforter had been thrown over a sheetless mattress. The cameraman, the former longtime porn actor Eric Edwards, took a quick break before starting, and scrounged among plastic dishware and congealed Danish-what passes for smorgasbord on the lower-rent sets-assembling a cup of coffee. Edwards started acting in summer stock and repertory and became a full- time porn actor in the late seventies. It was an era when filmmakers took weeks to shoot an X-rated movie, when they had rehearsals and dinner parties, when whole days would go by when they were shooting just dialogue and no sex, when a male actor like Eric Edwards made a thousand dollars a day and had a limo drive him to the airport and had his hand- and footprints immortalized in concrete on the sidewalk outside the Pussycat The- atre, in West Hollywood, as klieg lights swarmed the night sky. "Those were the glory days when you felt like a human be- ing," Edwards said, gazing into his plastic- foam cup. Now the actors "don't know enough to not look into the camera." "0. K., T. T. , we're going straight to sex," Sullivan said. 'We're going to full hard-core. No cable. Never hide it. Keep it nasty all the way." T.T. Boy tried to catch my eye, and I realized that in the